How much does weed spraying cost?
By The Weed GuyLast updated
For a typical UK drive, patio or garden, a one-off professional visit usually lands somewhere between £30 and £100. Checkatrade's weeding cost guide puts a gardener at £15 to £45 an hour (around £30 on average), and MyJobQuote's 2026 guide prices a patio or driveway weeding job at £50 to £100. Nobody prices weed spraying off a national table though, so treat that as the sensible bracket, not a quote.
What a professional visit costs
The big cost guides broadly agree. Checkatrade has most gardeners folding weeding into their normal rate, £15 to £45 an hour, with a regular weeding visit at £30 to £50 and a full day of clearing at £150 to £250. MyJobQuote puts the average weeding job at about £50 and a chemical weed treatment at £20 to £60 on top of the labour. So a small path might cost you an hour of someone's time, while a drive that has been left for two summers is a half-day job. If a quote sits well outside those ranges in either direction, ask why.
What moves the price
What moves the price is mostly size and how established the weeds are, but the weed itself matters too. Ordinary annuals in the joints die with one treatment. Deep-rooted perennials like horsetail need repeat visits across a season or more, so anyone pricing horsetail honestly will price for more than one trip. Awkward access, steep banks and clearing away the dead growth all add time, and time is what you are paying for. Regular visits work the other way: a surface someone already keeps on top of is a smaller job each time, so the per-visit price drops. And truly invasive stuff like Japanese knotweed is a different market altogether, MyJobQuote puts specialist invasive weed removal at £1,000 to £7,000, which is exactly why it is specialist territory and not a spray-and-go job.
What it costs to do it yourself
Now the honest comparison: doing it yourself is far cheaper. A 5 litre pump sprayer is £12 at B&Q, and a 280ml bottle of Roundup Optima+ glyphosate concentrate is £16.49 at Homebase, with claimed coverage up to 420 square metres, which is an average drive many times over. Call it under £30 for the whole kit, and the concentrate lasts for repeat treatments. What a professional brings is stronger product, the right dilution and picking the right day, because a treatment sprayed just before rain or outside the growing season is money wasted whoever holds the lance.
Which is worth doing
So the verdict. For a small area, buy the sprayer and the concentrate: the kit costs less than a single visit and you can treat the fresh growth each season for years. For a big, established problem, or a weed that keeps coming back no matter what you put on it, get two or three local quotes, check the price includes the product, and ask what happens if the weeds are not visibly dying within a month. A fair one-off price for a normal drive or patio sits in that £50 to £100 band.